Real Silk picture to heat up screens soon

CHENNAI: Audiences in the North would have got a whiff of the life of doomed sex symbol of the South, Silk Smitha, only after the release of  The Dirty Picture on Friday. But, there’s more to it than meets the eye if one were to go by the words of a former cop. A Tamil movie made by a former police inspector, which has not been released, in which the actress herself played the heroine 15 years ago, is likely to be dubbed in Hindi and released soon. Tamil audiences too can expect the original version to be released in the south. Inspector-turned-filmmaker Tirupathi Rajan has claimed that Silk last acted in his movie titled Thanga Thamarai (Golden Lotus) before she died in 1996.Tirupathi Rajan said that he could not release the movie due to financial crunch and that now he is in talks with a Bollywood producer to sell the Hindi rights for the film. “I wanted to release it in 2007 — 11 years after her death — but had financial issues. The Bollywood producer called me more than a month before the present Hindi movie on Silk was supposed to be released. We have finalised everything, only the money aspect and signing of the deal has to be done. I will make announcements very soon,” said Tirupathi Rajan overphone from Mumbai, where he has gone to finalise the deal.Thanga Thamarai, which, according to Rajan, was the last movie Silk acted before her death, is the story of a woman from an upper caste family, who lost her father and falls in love with the hero, who belongs to  a lower caste family;he explained. Rajan also claimed that he was first person to have signed agreement with Silk Smitha in Tamil films in 1979 and had also changed her name to ‘Smitha’ from her original name Jayamala. “I signed an agreement with her on September 17, 1980 when we were shooting the film Veenaiyum Naadhamum,” he claimed. Rajan, who was working as an inspector in Coimbatore, shot the movie with his name changed to Mugavai Magilan. “Smitha, who was only a touch-up artiste, lived in my house for one and a half years along with her mother till I completed the movie, ” he said. He also claimed that the Bollywood movie had only projected her as a B-grade artiste. “The Hindi movie has portrayed her very badly. I will show the true reason behind her death in my upcoming movie, Aradhana. I will also write a book on it,” he said.